Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Media Madness: from Lifetime to Heavy Metal

Beam Me Up Scotty Vader!



I must confess, I love Lifetime movies. I know, I know, but they do cover women's issues and often provide links for more information or to help/get help. I usually love my corny, lifetime movies, filled with stupid woman, villainized men, and sweet Mr. Right. But I was totally ticked about the ending of their movie, Risky Behavior or Unruly Behavior, whatever it was called.

It was about this girl, who got a little wild on Spring break, and some guy spliced video of her together with other footage to make it look like she had engaged in a porno film. The film was then sold in porno shops everywhere and plastered across the internet. Our heroine, then lost her teaching job and was left out in the cold by her boyfriend, while she gained a creepy stalker. She goes to the police and a lawyer, but they can't do anything because of this and that, and as the lawyer says, "Who knows what kind of laws they have in California!?" Yes, us anarchtic Californians screwed her over. But basicly, this porn is apparently legal. Eventually, her boyfriend quit being a selfish jerk long enough to support her, as she heads out to LA to face these bastards on her own. After the porn distributor glows over her, thinking she came to work for him, and calls her a rare talent, he quickly turns to laughing at her, gloating over his victory, and dismissing her as replaceable as a porn actress, despite his earlier comments indicating the contrary to that last statement. Anywho, our heroine manages to snag the address for the guy who made the video by enlisting the receptionist's help. She then goes to his house, alone, and enters it, alone except for the guy. He threatens her, she laughs at him and smashes all his expensive equipment while he stands there, stares, and semi-yells "Stop!" Then when she's about to leave. he finally moves and steps on broken glass/plastic with his bare feet, and doesn't manage to hobble out to the street until she's already in her car and driving away, musing about how happy she is with the outcome because she still has her integrity. Just not her job. And maybe not a her boyfriend. And she can never go home again.

What was that? What was that? I mean, this is a disturbing movie, if what it says is true. Someone can take your image, and make a porno with it, and make money with it, and it's legal? And more important to those of us who fancy clothes, what about one comment one of the lawyers made, that a guy can stick a camera up a girls skirt at a grocery store and that's legal? What? If that's true, that needs to stop. Where are you lifetime, when we need you to mobilize us, educate us? Telling us we have our dignity, pfft. I always have my dignity. But that's not right, and I will look into if that is true or not.

To balance this post's chi out, kudos to VH1's Rock Documentary, Metal: A Headbanger's Journey. It made me think and look at heavy metal in a new way, with more respect. I always knew I liked some metal, but it seems I like a lot more than previously thought. Great interviews; Dee Snider was as entertaining as always when he was recounting his speech on censorship. Clothing related, I enjoyed the documentaries musings on the looks of heavy metal, which go from the very feminine looks of the glam rockers, to the very masculane looks of other metal genres, which are actually kind of homoerotic when you consider that 90% of the audience is male. And despite the attire, metal is considered very heterosexual and masculine. I also loved SlipKnot sitting there, being interviewed and talking all normal and intelligent while in their stage get-ups (maybe they where those for all public appearances; I'm not too up on SlipKnot.) It was just hilarious since in these freaky-zombie get ups, where you can barely see their lips moving when they talk (are those masks, or a combination of mask and make up, or just make-up?) and instead of the sort of gutteral voices and scary thoughts you expect to come out, they're just talking normal. It would have been perfect if they were sipping tea from some dainty little tea cups. I doubt they'd go for it, or maybe they already have...

My only quip was the Dio interviews. Did they really have to air so much of Dio just dissing Gene Simmons. I mean, we got the point, he doesn't like Gene Simmons and considers him very arrogant. I have no particular love for the man, either of them actually, but dude, let's move on. They could have used that airtime on some of the other points I was kind of fuzzy on, like women and metal. They had one women who was glad to have been a groupie and would encourage it in a woman who considered it. They also then had some of the guys talking about what pigs/jerks they were to these women, as they said. That just left me kind of confused. Of course, my cable kept frizzing on me so I missed some of what they said; maybe that would have cleared up my confusion. I also missed some parts since I changed the channel on their hour long commercial breaks. I mean really, I could watch a whole movie on one of those commercial breaks.

Other than that, great rockumentary. Gave some cred to metal by pointing to roots in classical composers like some guy who like his music low and restructured his orchestra by adding extra bases and even some huge cello/base thing that required one person on a ladder to hold the strings and another person on the ground to run the stick-thingy over the strings. I can't remember the name, and I really wanted to check him out. It also pointed to roots in the blues. I would have loved to see them reconcile this Metallica's attitude that all they did was play as loud and as fast as they could, although perhaps the comment by Metallica was taken out of context.

\m/ Rock on, \m/

Ivy Frozen

P.S. How do they keep banging their heads like that? I get a huge headache and the feeling of my head hitting skull. I love the movement of the hair though when the guitarists do it...

My Outfit: Built around my hat. click the pick to head to its flickr page for more details.

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